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lapsedmodernistI used to write reviews of Buffy on here, and I've slacked in the last year or so. Lately my Buffy analysis is kind of dominated by trying to figure out who is acting like Dubya and where the hell is it going. Now we have the ubervillain of the season, or at least his right hand--Caleb, who is a wacky fundamentalist Christian-esque mysoginist who malaprops words and kills "dirty girls." Now he sounds like Dubya. And I mean literally. The accent, the delivery, the mangled speech.
But right now I want to talk about Angel. That show has really weird interpersonal dynamics and family issues, but good consistently antiestablishment politics, and the current storyline is really timely. The Big Bad of the season just showed up. Her name is Jasmine. She appears as a charsmatic, benevolent deity, who has come to bring love to the world. Through mind control she makes everyone love her and be happy about loving her (even when it entails being eaten by her--literally). She creates a discourse where she is creating a common good, and everyone who is against her is evil and must be eliminated. All the people who are her followers are telepathically connected to her, and are her eyes and ears--it's like Homeland Security total surveillance model from hell where the metaphor has become literal. The only people who can see that she is really a rotting corpse full of maggots are the people who come in contact with her blood (much like the American public which usually remains blind until droplets of American blood land on the TV-generated lenses through which they view everything). So Angel and his crew have to go underground. Literally. They are hunted for dissent. Everyone else is in line. On last week's episode, Fred, one of Angel's crew went shopping for mind control books at a store run by a conspiracy theorist guy. By the end of the episode his capacity for critical through has been eliminated; he succumbs to Jasmine's discourse of repressive desublimation (because everyone is HAPPY because they are not lonely/alienated anymore, they are part of a GROUP, and everyone who does not subscribe to the ideology of the group is an enemy). Jasmine rewards him for his help by answering what I guess has been a burning question for him all his life: "There was no second gunman. Oswald acted alone." Maybe the fact that that is the "official" story that she shares as the ultimate truth is random, maybe it's not. It's not random that the *local* government resigns and Jasmine states that now she has the ultimate power. And it's certainly not coincidental that when Angel's son, who is still under Jasmine's spell finally hunts down the insurrectionists underground, he is leading a crew of the National Guard. For real. With uniforms and everything. It's not random that in the last episode a demon delivered a speech about "jihad against demons." It's not random that Jasmine establishes a religious context for herself, and people respond by replacing all the "false idols" in churches with pictures of her. I bet the Pope would be against her too. And so would the Dixie Chicks.
It's really the ethos, more than anything, that ethos of repressive desublimation of patriotism-in-its-current-incarnation. We will make you happy. We will make you not alone. You will love the Big Brother. Deviation is tantamount to alienation which, thanks to the current metonymic equivocation of everything to each other, equals subversion and treachery.
Interestingly enough, Whedon also seems to like using "insane" people as the ones who can see the truth--in season 5 of Buffy only the "crazies" saw Dawn for what she really was, and now on Angel the first man to see Jasmine for what she is ends up in a mental institution. That touches on two important discourses of insanity. One is the Foucauldian idea of medicalizing/repressing insanity and thus transforming the status of a "fool" that used to be a locus for resistance (think the Medieval jester, or the Russian clairvoyant "touched" "yurodiviy") into a "patient" who was a subject of normative sanctions. The other is the blatant historical practice of dealing with political deviants by putting them into mental institution (very common in USSR, among other places).
I remember the end of Buffy's season 4, when Buffy and her "band of freaks" including her newly self-declared Anarchist boyfriend prevented mass annihilation as a result of a government military Initiative gone horribly wrong.
The final assessment of the situation was a voiceover by a senator who was one of the sponsors of the Initiative:
Senator: "And it seems it was only through the actions of a deserter, and a group of civilian insurrectionists, that our losses were not total. I trust the irony of that is not lost on any of us."
Well, at least on Angel people will be shake the spell off. That's how Joss Whedon's narratives work. Personal relationships end in heart-wrenching misery, but when push comes to shove, Whedon's Marxist streak comes through and the masses get mobilized, or at least shake off false consciousness (although not the willful denial that the residents of Sunnydale seem to have developed as a coping strategy). I only hope that life will imitate art.
But right now I want to talk about Angel. That show has really weird interpersonal dynamics and family issues, but good consistently antiestablishment politics, and the current storyline is really timely. The Big Bad of the season just showed up. Her name is Jasmine. She appears as a charsmatic, benevolent deity, who has come to bring love to the world. Through mind control she makes everyone love her and be happy about loving her (even when it entails being eaten by her--literally). She creates a discourse where she is creating a common good, and everyone who is against her is evil and must be eliminated. All the people who are her followers are telepathically connected to her, and are her eyes and ears--it's like Homeland Security total surveillance model from hell where the metaphor has become literal. The only people who can see that she is really a rotting corpse full of maggots are the people who come in contact with her blood (much like the American public which usually remains blind until droplets of American blood land on the TV-generated lenses through which they view everything). So Angel and his crew have to go underground. Literally. They are hunted for dissent. Everyone else is in line. On last week's episode, Fred, one of Angel's crew went shopping for mind control books at a store run by a conspiracy theorist guy. By the end of the episode his capacity for critical through has been eliminated; he succumbs to Jasmine's discourse of repressive desublimation (because everyone is HAPPY because they are not lonely/alienated anymore, they are part of a GROUP, and everyone who does not subscribe to the ideology of the group is an enemy). Jasmine rewards him for his help by answering what I guess has been a burning question for him all his life: "There was no second gunman. Oswald acted alone." Maybe the fact that that is the "official" story that she shares as the ultimate truth is random, maybe it's not. It's not random that the *local* government resigns and Jasmine states that now she has the ultimate power. And it's certainly not coincidental that when Angel's son, who is still under Jasmine's spell finally hunts down the insurrectionists underground, he is leading a crew of the National Guard. For real. With uniforms and everything. It's not random that in the last episode a demon delivered a speech about "jihad against demons." It's not random that Jasmine establishes a religious context for herself, and people respond by replacing all the "false idols" in churches with pictures of her. I bet the Pope would be against her too. And so would the Dixie Chicks.
It's really the ethos, more than anything, that ethos of repressive desublimation of patriotism-in-its-current-incarnation. We will make you happy. We will make you not alone. You will love the Big Brother. Deviation is tantamount to alienation which, thanks to the current metonymic equivocation of everything to each other, equals subversion and treachery.
Interestingly enough, Whedon also seems to like using "insane" people as the ones who can see the truth--in season 5 of Buffy only the "crazies" saw Dawn for what she really was, and now on Angel the first man to see Jasmine for what she is ends up in a mental institution. That touches on two important discourses of insanity. One is the Foucauldian idea of medicalizing/repressing insanity and thus transforming the status of a "fool" that used to be a locus for resistance (think the Medieval jester, or the Russian clairvoyant "touched" "yurodiviy") into a "patient" who was a subject of normative sanctions. The other is the blatant historical practice of dealing with political deviants by putting them into mental institution (very common in USSR, among other places).
I remember the end of Buffy's season 4, when Buffy and her "band of freaks" including her newly self-declared Anarchist boyfriend prevented mass annihilation as a result of a government military Initiative gone horribly wrong.
The final assessment of the situation was a voiceover by a senator who was one of the sponsors of the Initiative:
Senator: "And it seems it was only through the actions of a deserter, and a group of civilian insurrectionists, that our losses were not total. I trust the irony of that is not lost on any of us."
Well, at least on Angel people will be shake the spell off. That's how Joss Whedon's narratives work. Personal relationships end in heart-wrenching misery, but when push comes to shove, Whedon's Marxist streak comes through and the masses get mobilized, or at least shake off false consciousness (although not the willful denial that the residents of Sunnydale seem to have developed as a coping strategy). I only hope that life will imitate art.
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it reminded me
Date: 2003-04-24 06:08 am (UTC)"Would you take action that would cause the loss of hundreds of innocent lives?" -- Yes.
"Would you throw acid in the face of a baby?" -- Yes.
It seems interesting to me that the author whom many people cite as being so foreseeing of the current times practically recommended terrorism - and certainly recommended isolated cells of activists - as the solution to a society based on information control and superpower resource wars.
Re: it reminded me
Date: 2003-04-24 09:00 am (UTC)We see bits and pieces of that right now...the "terrorist" other being constructed, to be criminalized out of war protesters (hello, Oregon bill from hell), the protesters on Vieques Island, etc. The broader the definition of "terrorism" is the easier it will be to make the "Sunset" provisions of Patriot Act I permanent, and to pass Patriot II. Certainly, a lot of groups are being infiltrated by the government. The only difference so far is, instead of crushing any and all ideological deviation, the media and the government propaganda machine invalidates them, and excludes them from media discourse. So far.